As you can well imagine, I totally :heart: BAA

If you have a tolerable holiday, they get revenue from you.

If you have a miserable time stuck in the airport lounge because your pilot was too drunk to fly, the Air Traffic Controllers in France fancy a day off, or because BAA have bought a shonky computer network from a bloke in a pub then they get (if anything) more revenue from you because you're trapped in their airport buying goods and services from their approved franchises.

Which is nice.

Not 100% relevant, but marvellous

Picture of the Day

Next time you decide to drive a car overloaded with squabbling children and mouldy camping equipment to some godforsaken corner of Europe that isn't even worth building on, remember this: The owner of that caravan in the fast lane is probably wearing one of these.

It is, as the packet says, especially suitable for long distance driving, night driving, and drunk driving.

And it might not be working...

Culture, Korea, and HG Wells

With St.George's day upon us, and thoughts of our shared culture uppermost in our minds, it's important to reflect on what Britishness really is.

It isn't bowler hats, morris dancers and fried breakfasts. We aren't a backward-looking people. There's no time for nostalgia and hidebound monoculturalism when we're busy getting phalanxes of Polish builders to knock up more and more Starbucks outlets or learning Mandarin so we can sell Johnny Foreigner some more riot-suppression kit.

Paradoxically, the most 'English' places you can find are the Costa Del Sol (which has been transformed into a rather more arid Blackpool by waves of migrant cabbies) and, most surprisingly, a small corner of Korea.

The people who go to these places aren't tourists in the conventional sense. They're Time Travellers who fear the bright future where we all live in one enormous Tesco and, instead, seek a safe haven in the mid-Sixties.

The mid-Sixties are pretty hard to access with our current technology so instead they've built the lost Albion of their childhood dreams somewhere hot.

The thing is, these arch-conservatives can migrate away from our island home all they want but they'll never be satisfied. Once they get past the novelty of washing some oilier-than average fish & chips down with an overpriced bottle of San Miguel while they're reading a suspiciously thin copy of the Daily Express the crushing realisation that there's no weather and so they have nothing to talk about will destroy their souls more thoroughly than a thousand Asylum Seekers hostels would have done.

They might as well save themselves a few bob and just buy a boxed set of Heartbeat DVDs. Except they can't.

Stag Nights: Bad enough at home.....

The true and tragic tale of an overseas Stag Night. It's full of amusement and unpleasant incident in equal measure. It's funny because it's true.

If you're one of those impatient characters who just want to know how it turns out, it concludes thusly:

I wake up covered in bruises and sunburns. After getting a bite to eat, I am admonished again, this time for booking a late flight. We end up in Hogans bar again, drinking til 3pm when we make our way to the airport and a flight delay. By the time everyone rolls back into Gatwick, it is 11pm on Sunday night and my name is mud. I try not to tell too many people that I've got the week off work.

At Victoria tube, the group is now down to me and two Kevins. Garry heads south and misses the last tube. Kevin A and myself run out at Oxford Circus and jog with backpacks to the Central line, but it's too late. A tannoy is announcing that the underground has now closed for the night, and Fuck Off. We surface to a drizzly London evening. The first people we see are Polish maintenance men and cockneys about to tinker with the tube and, on street level, a group of Spaniards going one way, and a French group going another. We are forced to add to the £300 spent this weekend (not including flights and accommodation), and get a black cab home to West London. I'm home gone midnight.

Picture of the Day

Wish you were here?

I'm afraid I can't tell you precisely where this is, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that it isn't in the Home Counties.

If you've been to one profoundly disappointing theme park, you've been to them all...

An axiom which fails adequately to explain why this chap went all the way to Thailand in order to visit a Happy Shopper Disneyland.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't trust my overall well-being to any rollercoaster on the basis that they tend to be assembled by surly unemployables with 'cut here' tattooed on their throats : the idea that I might travel (at great expense) to some distant land where the natives display an even more laissez-faire attitude to health and safety than that of our own itinerant showmen would be intensely comical were it not an indictment of my basic common sense.